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In theory datalog is better than SQL. However the reality is that we have millions of programmer-hours invested in making SQL perform well where datalog has no

In theory datalog is better than SQL. However the reality is that we have millions of programmer-hours invested in making SQL perform well where datalog has no where near this effort. I think that's why NoSQL is where the gains are being made. You can't magically improve things with a query language without putting the effort into performance, but you can get huge gains by changing your assumptions about how data is structured.

neuronic 5y ago
Can you? For every article hating SQL there is one for hating NoSQL: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never...
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  NoSQL is much bigger than Mongo, which deservers books written on hating it. The relational algebra is great, but its also overkill for things like event streams, message brokers, caches, does hit scalability issues for certain legitimately large workloads, and in comparison to Mongo and other document-based databases, fails when your data simply is not relational. Then there's the whole object/relational impedance missmatch, which if you insist on using OOP, there's a variety of object databases that make a small persistance layer much easier.
  - balfirevic 5y ago
    > fails when your data simply is not relational What's an example of data that's not relational?
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      One case is where you have fairly ragged entities that may have several of many attributes but result in very sparse rows. Another case is when users are effectively designing their own schemas but you want to keep them, for example I have a database for a CMS where users can define nested hierarchies of keys with translations that would be impossible to fit into a schema. You could just toss this data into a JSON column, but its an example of nonrelational data.

neuronic 5y ago

Can you? For every article hating SQL there is one for hating NoSQL: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never...

blacktriangle 5y ago
NoSQL is much bigger than Mongo, which deservers books written on hating it. The relational algebra is great, but its also overkill for things like event streams, message brokers, caches, does hit scalability issues for certain legitimately large workloads, and in comparison to Mongo and other document-based databases, fails when your data simply is not relational. Then there's the whole object/relational impedance missmatch, which if you insist on using OOP, there's a variety of object databases that make a small persistance layer much easier.
- balfirevic 5y ago
  > fails when your data simply is not relational What's an example of data that's not relational?
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    One case is where you have fairly ragged entities that may have several of many attributes but result in very sparse rows. Another case is when users are effectively designing their own schemas but you want to keep them, for example I have a database for a CMS where users can define nested hierarchies of keys with translations that would be impossible to fit into a schema. You could just toss this data into a JSON column, but its an example of nonrelational data.